Paddling from the South End

Greenwood Lake is two lakes that meet in the middle, and which one you are paddling changes almost everything. North of Storms Island the water is the original glacial lake — fifty to sixty feet deep, steep-sided, cold and clear. South of it, where we are, the water is barely ten feet deep at its worst and much less than that in places, because it is not lake at all. It is farmland that was flooded in 1836 when the Morris Canal company raised the dam about twelve feet to feed a canal.

For a swimmer that is a shame. For anyone in a kayak it is the single best thing about this end of the lake. Shallow water is sheltered water: the ridges come down close, the fetch is short, and the motorboats slow down of their own accord because of the weed and the stumps. You get the quiet half. You just have to respect what is under it.

Where to put in

Guests staying at the house have the easiest answer — the dock, with the kayaks, the canoe and the paddleboards that live in the boathouse store. Everything below is for a second boat, or for a day when you want to start somewhere else.

Three routes

In rough order of how much the weather has to cooperate.

• The Belcher Creek loop, three to five miles. West from the dock or Brown’s Point, into the creek inlet, around Fox Island and back. Shallow, sheltered, and much the best water for herons, egrets and the occasional bald eagle. This is the route that works on a day when nothing else does.
• Up to Storms Island and back. North along the west shore, turning at the island that marks where the shallow basin ends. Do it on a calm morning: you are on more open water for the second half of it.
• The state line and back, or one way with a car at the other end. A real day out, and it crosses the busiest, most exposed water on the lake. Glassy mornings only, and be off it early.

Go at first light

This is the one piece of advice worth more than the rest put together, and it follows from the shape of the lake. Greenwood Lake runs north to south for about seven miles by the state’s count — the lake commission says nine — and is barely two-thirds of a mile across at its widest. Any wind blowing along that axis has miles of open water to build a chop in, and it builds one.

So the calm is in the morning, and so is the empty water. On a summer weekend the traffic is up by late morning and the middle of the lake becomes a wake-filled highway; by afternoon there is usually a breeze along the axis as well. Launch at first light and you get the two best hours of the day. If the forecast has sustained north or south wind much above twelve or fifteen miles an hour, stay in the southern coves and the creek — they are sheltered precisely when the rest of the lake is not.

What will actually get you into trouble

• Wakes and traffic, by a distance the biggest hazard. Stay near a shore, be conspicuous, and cross open water early.
• Submerged stumps, south of Storms Island. The trees that were standing in 1836 are still down there. In low water they will stop a hull or turn an ankle.
• Weed. The south end is shallow, warm and productive, and by late summer parts of it are hard work to paddle through.
• Harmful algal blooms. Greenwood Lake gets them, worst at the New Jersey end — the state advised against contact with the water on the New Jersey side for much of the summer of 2019, and there were further advisories in 2023 restricting swimming, wading and paddling. Check the NJDEP status in warm, calm, late-summer weather, and stay out of any green scum. Keep dogs out of it too.
• Drawdown autumns. New Jersey lowers the lake by up to about five feet every four or five years from mid-October for weed control and dock repair. In one of those years the south end is a good deal shallower, with more stumps and mudflat showing than usual.

The rules, and one that people get wrong

In New Jersey waters the limits are 45 mph by day, 15 mph from half an hour after sunset to half an hour before sunrise, and 5 mph within 200 feet of the shore, a dock, a raft or a moored boat. That last one is the one that matters to a paddler, because it covers most of the water you will be on.

The one people get wrong: there is no daytime 15 mph zone at the south end. It gets repeated locally, but the 15 mph figure is the after-dark limit and it applies to the whole New Jersey portion. Do not paddle as though a slow zone is protecting you.

A Coast Guard-approved life jacket has to be aboard for every person, and children twelve and under have to wear one while you are underway. Given the traffic here, treat it as a lake where everyone wears one rather than carries one — neighboring Upper Greenwood Lake made exactly that rule for kayaks and paddleboards in 2023. North of the state line you are under New York law and the village’s own rules, including no wake-producing speed north of the buoys at the two arms.

The three islands are all private

Fox Island sits near the south end, an acre or so of trees close to the southwest shore, and it marks where Peter Hasenclever put the first dam in around 1765 to drive ironworks downstream. Storms Island is the landmark that separates the shallow half from the deep one. Chapel Island, on the New York side, once held a chapel you could only reach by boat, which burned around 1948; a single large house stands there now.

All three are private, with houses on them. There is no public island to land on and picnic — if you have heard otherwise, it is a piece of the resort era that has not been true for a long time. Picnic on the shore instead: Brown’s Point at this end, or Morahan Waterfront Park up in the village.

What you are paddling over

The dam at the southeast corner is concrete now, built in about 1927 on the 1836 site, roughly eighteen feet high with three sluice gates in the gatehouse. It is classified high hazard, which is a statement about what is downstream rather than about its condition. What is downstream is the Wanaque River, this lake’s only outlet, feeding the Monksville and Wanaque reservoirs — drinking water for more than three million people in northern New Jersey. It is a useful thing to know while deciding what to tip into the water.

And it was a resort before it was a suburb. From the 1870s the railway brought New Yorkers to the south end and steamboats carried them up to the hotels — the largest of them took four hundred passengers. Jasper Cropsey painted the lake from 1843 onward. Almost none of the grand hotels survive. The Munsee called the lake Quampium; the settlers called it Long Pond, for the obvious reason; Greenwood Lake is the name the resort era gave it.

The lake, end to end · Fishing Greenwood Lake · What is in the boathouse